Keyword Search

Keyword Search Explained

Keywords are the words or phrases people type in the search engine front end to find sites that provide them with the information they are looking for. Search engines index millions of pages from the web and store specific information about them in their own respective databases. When users type the search phrases in their front end interface, search engines look for the best match using certain proprietary algorithms and present the searcher with the most relevant sites. The search engines objective here is to give the searchers "exactly" what they are looking for. The more the user has to search for the relevant information, the lesser is the efficiency of the search engines.

There are two factors that are very important while defining the relationship between the keyphrases and the web pages: (a) how many times has this keyword been searched in the search engines or how popular is this keyword and (b) how is your web page related to this keyword or how many times have you used this keyword or its variant in your web page content.

Keyword selection is one of the first steps in implementing a search engine optimization strategy. If you select the wrong keywords you will either get no visitors or get all the wrong visitors to your website, which would be a waste of all your efforts. Hence, the choice of keywords is one of the main factors in determining the success or failure of your website.

Keyword Research Concepts

Keyword Research depends on the type of site you are optimizing. Static sites that contain a limited number of static pages will need a limited number of keywords. In general, it is a good idea to restrict the keywords to 2-3 per page, if not less. Thus, if you are building a brand new site, you can first decide what keywords you think your users might type and then construct the architecture of that site with maybe one or two keywords per page. For dynamic sites, you can always use 1-2 keywords and their variants per page. As dynamic pages tend to be unlimited in nature due to the changing content and the products they represent, the keywords could keep varying.

You need to note down the keywords you think are appropriate for the site you are optimizing. Discuss the keywords with colleagues, friends trying to find out what they would type to find your products. Collect as many variants and ideas for keywords originating from the site and its offerings.

After building a comprehensive list of keywords, you need to short list the ones best suited.

• Many search engines do not do "word stemming" (word stemming is adding on to the end of the word, for example the word "shoe" and "shoes"),
• Most people type keywords into a search engine all in lower case (and in fact, there is no sense in optimizing for lower or upper case, since the search engine will treat it as the same keyword)

Longer keyword phrases generally rank better as there are less number of sites that contain sufficient amounts of these longer phrases to rank well. This, of course does not mean that you should not include broader terms in you final selection.

The Keyword Selection Process

Here are some of the main steps involved in keyword research: